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You are not a 'product' you are a vendor and companies have to maintain good relationships with their vendors or they will lose them.

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Not when you do not monitize your channel. At that point, you're not even a product.

In that case you're a loss-leader.

Curious of the ramifications of the fact that companies normally only have a handful of vendors relative to their employee size, but have tons and tons of "vendor" end-users.

It depends on the kind of business you're in. I work for a sales driven MSP and we have a ton of actually vendors in the normal sense of the word. We probably have more vendors than we have employees but I haven't counted. We spend less time maintaining out relationships with them than we do our customers but that's more because half of them are big impersonal companies like MS which don't require a lot of effort, just a little bureaucracy.

I think that Youtube is in a different situation in that their creators are mostly individuals who use Youtube because it affords them advantages that they can't get elsewhere. If that were to change, either with Youtube becoming less popular or another platform becoming good enough, Youtube would lose a lot of its video makers and that would lose them a lot of business. I don't think Youtube's problem is that they see creators as products so much as that in order to maintain their market position, they have to be all things to all people and they desperately want to automate their business. That means there's not going to be any policy that works for everyone that uses Youtube and no matter what they do, somebody is going to get screwed.

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